dimanche, janvier 25, 2009

I'll admit that I've got a nasty case of corrective tourette's. But I would never dream of modifying something as important as the Presidential oath of office, as written in the United States Constitution, much less eschewing notes and doing it from memory. Too bad Chief Justice John Roberts did. And that he flubbed it and had to re-administer it later.

IN 1969, Neil Armstrong appeared to have omitted an indefinite article as he stepped onto the moon and left earthlings puzzled over the difference between “man” and “mankind.” In 1980, Jimmy Carter, accepting his party’s nomination, paid homage to a former vice president he called Hubert Horatio Hornblower. A year later, Diana Spencer reversed the first two names of her betrothed in her wedding vows, and thus, as Prince Charles Philip supposedly later joked, actually married his father.

On Tuesday, Chief Justice John Roberts joined the Flubber Hall of Fame when he administered the presidential oath of office apparently without notes. Instead of having Barack Obama “solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States,” Chief Justice Roberts had him “solemnly swear that I will execute the office of president to the United States faithfully.” When Mr. Obama paused after “execute,” the chief justice prompted him to continue with “faithfully the office of president of the United States.” (To ensure that the president was properly sworn in, the chief justice re-administered the oath Wednesday evening.)

How could a famous stickler for grammar have bungled that 35-word passage, among the best-known words in the Constitution? Conspiracy theorists and connoisseurs of Freudian slips have surmised that it was unconscious retaliation for Senator Obama’s vote against the chief justice’s confirmation in 2005. But a simpler explanation is that the wayward adverb in the passage is blowback from Chief Justice Roberts’s habit of grammatical niggling.

Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by great writers for centuries, and that have been disavowed by every thoughtful usage manual. Nonetheless, they refuse to go away, perpetuated by the Gotcha! Gang and meekly obeyed by insecure writers.

Among these fetishes is the prohibition against “split verbs,” in which an adverb comes between an infinitive marker like “to,” or an auxiliary like “will,” and the main verb of the sentence. According to this superstition, Captain Kirk made a grammatical error when he declared that the five-year mission of the starship Enterprise was “to boldly go where no man has gone before”; it should have been “to go boldly.” Likewise, Dolly Parton should not have declared that “I will always love you” but “I always will love you” or “I will love you always.”

Any speaker who has not been brainwashed by the split-verb myth can sense that these corrections go against the rhythm and logic of English phrasing. The myth originated centuries ago in a thick-witted analogy to Latin, in which it is impossible to split an infinitive because it consists of a single word, like dicere, “to say.” But in English, infinitives like “to go” and future-tense forms like “will go” are two words, not one, and there is not the slightest reason to interdict adverbs from the position between them.

Though the ungrammaticality of split verbs is an urban legend, it found its way into The Texas Law Review Manual on Style, which is the arbiter of usage for many law review journals. James Lindgren, a critic of the manual, has found that many lawyers have “internalized the bogus rule so that they actually believe that a split verb should be avoided,” adding, “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers has succeeded so well that many can no longer distinguish alien speech from native speech.”

In his legal opinions, Chief Justice Roberts has altered quotations to conform to his notions of grammaticality, as when he excised the “ain’t” from Bob Dylan’s line “When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.” On Tuesday his inner copy editor overrode any instincts toward strict constructionism and unilaterally amended the Constitution by moving the adverb “faithfully” away from the verb.

President Obama, whose attention to language is obvious in his speeches and writings, smiled at the chief justice’s hypercorrection, then gamely repeated it. Let’s hope that during the next four years he will always challenge dogma and boldly lead the nation in new directions.Steven Pinker is a psychology professor at Harvard and the chairman of the usage panel of The American Heritage Dictionary.

samedi, janvier 24, 2009

This morning, as Ruby was kissing me after her walk, I started singing "Passionate kisses" to her. Then I asked Leo if he could play the song. He explained that the country version by Mary Chapin Carpenter was actually a cover of Lucinda Williams' original. And then he played both, kissed me, and headed to the gym.

Is it too much to ask?I want a comfortable bed that won't hurt my backFood to fill me upAnd warm clothes and all that stuff

Shouldn't I have this,Shouldn't I have this?Shouldn't I have all of this, andPassionate kissesPassionate kisses, whoa ohh ohPassionate kisses from you

Is it much to demandI want a full house and a rock and roll bandPens that won't run out of inkAnd cool quiet and time to think

Shouldn't I have this,Shouldn't I have this?Shouldn't I have all of this, andPassionate kissesPassionate kisses, whoa ohh ohPassionate kisses from you

Do I want too much?Am I going overboard to want that touch?I shouted out to the night:"Give me what I deserve, 'cause it's my right!"

Shouldn't I have this,Shouldn't I have this?Shouldn't I have all of this, andPassionate kissesPassionate kisses, whoa ohh ohPassionate kisses from you.

jeudi, janvier 22, 2009

He gave the invocation at Sunday's "We Are One" concert, kicking off this week's inaugural events. The big Lincoln Memorial show was billed as the "We Are One" concert, intended to celebrate the inauguration of Barack Obama with a spirit of unity. But his prayer was excluded from HBO's coverage.

Welcome to Washington! The fun is about to begin, but first, please join me in pausing for a moment, to ask God’s blessing upon our nation and our next president.

O God of our many understandings, we pray that you will…

Bless us with tears – for a world in which over a billion people exist on less than a dollar a day, where young women from many lands are beaten and raped for wanting an education, and thousands die daily from malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS.

Bless us with anger – at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

Bless us with discomfort – at the easy, simplistic “answers” we’ve preferred to hear from our politicians, instead of the truth, about ourselves and the world, which we need to face if we are going to rise to the challenges of the future.

Bless us with patience – and the knowledge that none of what ails us will be “fixed” anytime soon, and the understanding that our new president is a human being, not a messiah.

Bless us with humility – open to understanding that our own needs must always be balanced with those of the world.

Bless us with freedom from mere tolerance – replacing it with a genuine respect and warm embrace of our differences, and an understanding that in our diversity, we are stronger.Bless us with compassion and generosity – remembering that every religion’s God judges us by the way we care for the most vulnerable in the human community, whether across town or across the world.

And God, we give you thanks for your child Barack, as he assumes the office of President of the United States.Give him wisdom beyond his years, and inspire him with Lincoln’s reconciling leadership style, President Kennedy’s ability to enlist our best efforts, and Dr. King’s dream of a nation for ALL the people.Give him a quiet heart, for our Ship of State needs a steady, calm captain in these times.

Give him stirring words, for we will need to be inspired and motivated to make the personal and common sacrifices necessary to facing the challenges ahead.

Make him color-blind, reminding him of his own words that under his leadership, there will be neither red nor blue states, but the United States.

Help him remember his own oppression as a minority, drawing on that experience of discrimination, that he might seek to change the lives of those who are still its victims.

Give him the strength to find family time and privacy, and help him remember that even though he is president, a father only gets one shot at his daughters’ childhoods.And please, God, keep him safe. We know we ask too much of our presidents, and we’re asking FAR too much of this one. We know the risk he and his wife are taking for all of us, and we implore you, O good and great God, to keep him safe. Hold him in the palm of your hand – that he might do the work we have called him to do, that he might find joy in this impossible calling, and that in the end, he might lead us as a nation to a place of integrity, prosperity and peace.

For one day, for one hour, let us take a bow as a country. Nearly 233 years after our founding, 144 years after the close of our Civil War and 46 years after Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, this crazy quilt of immigrants called Americans finally elected a black man, Barack Hussein Obama, as president. Walking back from the inauguration, I saw an African-American street vendor wearing a home-stenciled T-shirt that pretty well captured the moment — and then some. It said: “Mission Accomplished.”

But we cannot let this be the last mold we break, let alone the last big mission we accomplish. Now that we have overcome biography, we need to write some new history — one that will reboot, revive and reinvigorate America. That, for me, was the essence of Obama’s inaugural speech and I hope we — and he — are really up to it.

Indeed, dare I say, I hope Obama really has been palling around all these years with that old Chicago radical Bill Ayers. I hope Obama really is a closet radical.

Not radical left or right, just a radical, because this is a radical moment. It is a moment for radical departures from business as usual in so many areas. We can’t thrive as a country any longer by coasting on our reputation, by postponing solutions to every big problem that might involve some pain and by telling ourselves that dramatic new initiatives — like a gasoline tax, national health care or banking reform — are too hard or “off the table.” So my most fervent hope about President Obama is that he will be as radical as this moment — that he will put everything on the table.

Opportunities for bold initiatives and truly new beginnings are rare in our system — in part because of the sheer inertia and stalemate designed into our Constitution, with its deliberate separation of powers, and in part because of the way lobbying money, a 24-hour news cycle and a permanent presidential campaign all conspire to paralyze big changes.

“The system is built for stalemate,” said Michael J. Sandel, the Harvard University political theorist. “In ordinary times, the energy and dynamism of American life reside in the economy and society, and people view government with suspicion or indifference. But in times of national crisis, Americans look to government to solve fundamental problems that affect them directly. These are the times when presidents can do big things. These moments are rare. But they offer the occasion for the kind of leadership that can recast the political landscape, and redefine the terms of political argument for a generation.”

In the 1930s, the Great Depression enabled Franklin Roosevelt to launch the New Deal and redefine the role of the federal government, he added, while in the 1960s, the assassination of John F. Kennedy and “the moral ferment of the civil rights movement” enabled Lyndon Johnson to enact his Great Society agenda, including Medicare, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

“These presidencies did more than enact new laws and programs,” concluded Sandel. “They rewrote the social contract, and redefined what it means to be a citizen. Obama’s moment, and his presidency, could be that consequential.”

George W. Bush completely squandered his post-9/11 moment to summon the country to a dramatic new rebuilding at home. This has left us in some very deep holes. These holes — and the broad awareness that we are at the bottom of them — is what makes this a radical moment, calling for radical departures from business as usual, led by Washington.

That is why this voter is hoping Obama will swing for the fences. But he also has to remember to run the bases. George Bush swung for some fences, but he often failed at the most basic element of leadership — competent management and follow-through.

President Obama will have to decide just how many fences he can swing for at one time: grand bargains on entitlement and immigration reform? A national health care system? A new clean-energy infrastructure? The nationalization and repair of our banking system? Will it be all or one? Some now and some later? It is too soon to say.

But I do know this: while a crisis is a terrible thing to waste, so too is a great politician, with a natural gift for oratory, a rare knack for bringing people together, and a nation, particularly its youth, ready to be summoned and to serve.

So, in sum, while it is impossible to exaggerate what a radical departure it is from our past that we have inaugurated a black man as president, it is equally impossible to exaggerate how much our future depends on a radical departure from our present. As Obama himself declared from the Capitol steps: “Our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions — that time has surely passed.”

We need to get back to work on our country and our planet in wholly new ways. The hour is late, the project couldn’t be harder, the stakes couldn’t be higher, the payoff couldn’t be greater.

dimanche, janvier 18, 2009

I cannot testify to what black Americans feel as our nation celebrates the inauguration of our first African-American president. But I can speak for myself, as a white American who grew up in the segregated nation’s capital of the 1960s. Barack Obama’s day is one that I never thought would come, and one that I still can’t quite believe is here.

Last week I joined a group of journalists at an off-the-record conversation with the president-elect, a sort of preview of the administration’s coming attractions. But as I walked some desolate downtown blocks to the standard-issue federal office building serving as transition headquarters, ghosts of the past mingled with hopes for the future. The contrast between the unemployed men on Washington’s frigid streets and the buzzing executive-branch bees inside was, for me, as old as time.

My particular historical vantage point is a product of my upbringing as that odd duck, a native Washingtonian whose parents were not in government. The first presidential transition of my sentient lifetime, Kennedy’s, I remember vividly. Even an 11-year-old could see that the sleepy Southern town of the Eisenhower era was waking up, electrified by youth, glamour and the prospect of change.

But some of that change I didn’t then understand. J.F.K.’s arrival coincided with Washington’s emergence as the first American city with a black majority. Many whites responded by fleeing to the suburbs. My parents did the opposite, moving our family from the enclave of Montgomery County, Md., into the city as I was about to enter the fifth grade.

Our new neighborhood included the Sidwell Friends School. My mother, a public school teacher, decreed that her children would instead enroll in the public system that had been desegregated a half-dozen years earlier, after Brown v. Board of Education. In reality de facto segregation remained in place. Though a few African-Americans and embassy Africans provided the window dressing of “integration,” my mostly white elementary, junior high and high schools had roughly the same diversity as, say, today’s G.O.P.

I wish I could say we were all outraged at this apartheid. But we were kids — privileged kids at that — and out of sight was out of mind. Except as household help, black Washington was generally as invisible to us as it was to the tourists who were rigidly segregated from the real Washington while visiting its many ivory marble shrines to democratic ideals.

Gradually we would learn more — from our parents and teachers, from televised incidents of violent racial confrontations far away, and from odd cultural phenomena like the 1961 best seller “Black Like Me.” In that book, a white novelist darkened his skin for undercover travels through deepest Dixie, whose bigotry he then described in morbid firsthand detail to shocked adolescents like me.

Surely such horrific injustices could not occur in our nation’s capital.

But as an unintended consequence of Washington’s particular brand of Jim Crow, white public school students got a tiny taste of what racially mandated second-class citizenship could mean. In those days, the city didn’t even have the bastardized form of “self-government” it has now; it was run as a plantation by Congressional District panels led by racist white Southerners (then Democrats). These overseers didn’t want to lavish money on an overwhelmingly black school system, and they didn’t. By the early 1960s, per-student spending in Washington was less than that of any state, impoverished West Virginia and Mississippi included.

If Washington’s white schools received a larger share of that meager budget, as they no doubt did, it was still obvious that our teachers had far fewer resources than their suburban and private school counterparts. Extracurricular activities could be curtailed by the costs of light and heat. The curriculum was also abridged, lest anyone get too agitated by America’s racial inequities. In my history class, the Civil War was downsized to a passing speed bump. In English, we read “Tom Sawyer,” not “Huckleberry Finn.”

Now that we were teenagers, we had both the curiosity and mobility to investigate the strangely undemocratic city that dealt us this hand. In the words of Constance McLaughlin Green, a Pulitzer Prize-winning urban historian, the District’s black population had long occupied “a secret city all but unknown to the white world round about.” We wanted in on the secrets.

There was so much we didn’t know, so much Americans still don’t know. Take the Lincoln Memorial, to which the Obama family paid so poignant a nocturnal visit this month. If you look up coverage of the memorial’s 1922 dedication ceremonies in The Times, you can read of President Harding’s forceful oration commemorating the demise of slavery. You also learn that Dr. Robert R. Moton, the president of the Tuskegee Institute, was invited to pay tribute to Lincoln “in the name of 12,000,000 Negroes.”

Here’s what The Times did not report about Moton: “Instead of being placed on the speaker’s platform, he was relegated along with other distinguished colored people to an all-Negro section separated by a road from the rest of the audience.” So wrote Green in “The Secret City,” her landmark history of race relations in Washington. This was no anomaly. A local Ku Klux Klan had been formed months earlier, with no protests from either Congress or the white press, and the young Harding administration had toughened the exclusion of blacks from the city’s public recreation facilities.

The eye-opening “Secret City” recounting this secret history was not published until 1967, some four years after the Lincoln Memorial served as a backdrop for “I Have a Dream.” It was also in 1967 that I graduated from Woodrow Wilson High. As a valedictory, a bunch of us on the school paper voted to publish an editorial in favor of home rule for D.C. “Washingtonians have to beg, plead and cajole members of Congress for funds to renovate slums and slum schools,” it read. That was putting it mildly; we still had much to learn. But the editorial was enough of an irritant that our principal tried to censor it, which prompted a brief civic kerfuffle (“Student Editorial Banned at Wilson” read the headline in The Washington Post) and jump-started a few starry-eyed careers in journalism and political activism.

It was one year later that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and Washington’s secret city exploded. The fires and riotscame within a block of the building where the Obama transition set up shop.

One would like to say in the aftermath of the 2008 election that everyone lived happily ever after. But the American drama, especially when it involves race, is always more complicated than that.

Looking back at my high school years, I’m struck by how slowly history can move. The great civil rights legislation of the Johnson administration had been accomplished in 1964 and 1965, but by the time of my graduation the impact was minimal — even in the city where the laws were written and passed. Today the nation’s capital still has no voting representation in Congress and is still a ward of the federal government, reduced to begging, pleading and cajoling for basic needs. Some 19 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, and that 19 percent remains a secret city to many who work within the Beltway.

Washington is its own special American case, but only up to a point. For all our huge progress, we are not “post-racial,” whatever that means. The world doesn’t change in a day, and the racial frictions that emerged in both the Democratic primary campaign and the general election didn’t end on Nov. 4. As Obama himself said in his great speech on race, liberals couldn’t “purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap” simply by voting for him. And conservatives? The so-called party of Lincoln has spent much of the past month in spirited debate about whether a white candidate for the party’s chairmanship did the right thing by sending out a “humorous” recording of “Barack the Magic Negro” as a holiday gift.

Next to much of our history, this is small stuff. And yet: Of all the coverage of Obama’s victory, the most accurate take may still be the piquant morning-after summation of the satirical newspaper The Onion. Under the headline “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job,” it reported that our new president will have “to spend four to eight years cleaning up the messes other people left behind.”

Those messes are enormous, bigger than Washington, bigger than race, bigger than anything most of us have ever seen. Nearly three months after Election Day, it remains astonishing that the American people have entrusted the job to a young black man who seemed to come out of nowhere looking for that kind of work just as we most needed him.

“In no other country on earth is my story even possible,” Obama is fond of saying. That is true, and that is what the country celebrates this week. But it is all the tragic American stories that came before him, some of them still playing out in chilly streets just blocks from the White House, that throw both his remarkable triumph and the huge challenge ahead of him into such heart-stopping relief.Via Aaryn

dimanche, janvier 11, 2009

Kitchenheimer's: When you're in the kitchen going around in circles because you can't remember what you were doing there.

I was in the kitchen this morning walking around in circles wondering what the hell I was looking for when the microwave beeped reminding me I was heating up my cup of coffee. My Kitchenheimer's is getting worse!Via UrbanDictionary.com